When I talk to CIOs, they usually complain that the trend of Bring Your Own Device, or BYOD, is undermining their ability to keep their organization's infrastructures and data secure. Every employee who comes to work with his or her smartphone or tablet and pulls up sales reports, help tickets and other corporate data creates a small hole in the IT armor companies have spent billions to build. Over time, the argument goes, the holes become a dangerous sieve.

My response to those worries: BYOD is a force of nature, so you better not get in its way. And it's just raising the curtain on another, even bigger trend that follows right behind it. Let's call it BYOS, short for "bring your own services."

You see, more than half the companies polled by market researcher IDC already have employees use their own devices, and they support them. It's an inflection point in the ongoing consumerization of IT. It's about what works well at home or on the road, it's about what satisfies our innate needs to stay in touch and keep working on crucial data. It's fundamentally about what people know, like and want.

The only way forward for companies is to embrace this movement. They should support multiple devices on multiple platforms and be creative when it comes to making access to their important data streams secure. It's a question of staying competitive in the market and attractive for new talent while not taking your eyes off compliance and liability issues.

Hardware liberation gives companies an even more amazing new tool: have employees or departments bring their own services. The consumer experience is leading the way in this instance, too. Elegant and intuitive user interfaces like we know from our personal web services and smart devices. Appification and connectors to many different services and data streams in the cloud or on-site let us create mash-ups to get work done here and now.

Yes, you can put out a request, evaluate different options and make a company-wide purchase. But that's so 20th century: slow, inefficient and costly. Bringing your own service opens an entire SMB, or a small group within a larger company, up to agile innovation like never before.

CIO, CTO & Developer Resources

This is not to belittle legitimate security concerns. Make data access, storage and transfer secure and compliant to your organization's rules and business processes, I tell CIOs or CEOs who will listen. But other than that, let a thousand flowers of Software-as-a-Service bloom.

If someone's driven by a burning business question, they will go out and find a service or a tool that lets them explore the answers. You know the drill from your own behavior as a Web 3.0 consumer. You strive to be quick, cheap and successful. Why shouldn't you have some visibility into this constant quest?

That's exactly how the smart people in your team will go out and hack the hard questions: What are the hidden profit centers? Where are our online dollars best spent? Who are the nodes in our extended network of partners and suppliers that contribute to our bottom line? Where are the other smart guys you can connect with? Where have we overlooked an opportunity to connect the dots between social media metrics and POS data?

New and powerful platforms such as Google Cloud Comput or salesforce often form the backbone to make this BYOS world possible. The whole company might tap into them, as will the curious ones who run an advanced business intelligence query on their personal tablet. It's too good an opportunity to pass up on if you are interested in getting better answers faster. If you lock down your employees and force them to use pre-ordained devices and services, you literally leave money on the table, every second and every click.

Yes, it's a scary revolution. It's driven by the consumerization of IT, the urge to harness Big Data, and the proliferation of public and private clouds. But you can have your data and let your employees eat it, too. Let them dissect and digest Big Data and in the process show you how everyone can mine their own business.

BYOS is a trend we won't be able to stop, just like we couldn't stop BYOD. We might as well get out in front of it and be successful before the rest of the corporate world stops being frightened.

Rachel Delacour is CEO and co-founder of BIME, a European startup that empowers businesses of any size to profit in era of Big Data. She is considered a subject matter expert on cloud computing, SaaS, BI, enterprise computing and Big Data. She has presented on stage at such leading industry events as: DEMO, GigaOm Structure: Data, Interop Enterprise Cloud Summit, Google I/O, American Marketing Association Conference and LeWeb. She is regularly interviewed and quoted by well-known outlets such as GigaOm and InformationWeek.

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